[Question:]{.underline} Is the Church telling the truth when it says of the Blessed Virgin Mary, “thou alone hast destroyed all heresies in the whole world”?
[Answer:]{.underline} It would by idyllic to imagine a time in which there would be no heresies, no individual persons who place their personal opinions over the Church’s authority and Magisterium. However, the fact that heresies exist, and that this time has manifestly not come, does not at all mean that this antiphon with which the Church honors the Blessed Virgin Mary, is not perfectly and literally true.
For there cannot be a time, this side of the General Judgment, in which heresies will not exist. St. Paul stated this very explicitly in his first letter to the Corinthians: “For there [must]{.underline} be also heresies: that they also, who are approved, may be made manifest among you” (11:19). The meaning of this antiphon is consequently not that there were be a time at which all heresies in the whole world are destroyed, but that at all times the Blessed Virgin Mary destroys all heresies in the whole world in those who are truly and profoundly devoted to her.
The meaning of this expression is very well explained by St. Pius X in his encyclical of 1904 for the 50^th^ anniversary of the definition of the Immaculate Conception. He there explains that the dogma of the Immaculate Conception contains in germ all Catholic doctrine and in particular the supernatural order of grace, that man in his proud rebellion refuses to accept. Devotion to the Immaculate Mother of God is consequently the only means to preserve the submission to God and to the Church’s authority that are the protection against all heresy and every error in the Faith.
“If people believe and profess that in the first moment of her conception the Virgin Mary was free from all stain, they must also admit the existence of original sin, the redemption of mankind by Christ, the Gospel, the Church and even the law of suffering. These truths will root up and destroy any kind of rationalism and materialism that exists…This doctrine compels us to recognize that power of the Church which demands intellectual as well as voluntary submission. Because of this intellectual submission the Christian people sing to the Mother of God: ‘Thou art all fair, O Mary, and there is no original stain in thee’. For this reason the Church rightly attributes the destruction of all heresies in the whole world to the venerable Virgin alone.” (Ad diem illum, §14)
Archbishop Lefebvre was himself very much aware of the wisdom of this teaching concerning devotion to the Blessed Mother as the great protection for the integrity of our Faith, especially for apostles of these last times: “May devotion to Mary be honored in every house and chapel of the Society, and in all the hearts of all its members! Mary will keep us in the Catholic Faith. She is neither liberal, nor modernist, nor ecumenical. She is impervious to all errors and
with even greater reason to heresies and apostasy.” (Spiritual Journey, p. 57)
Answered by Father Peter Scott, SSPX.